686 EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 



narrowly. The title of psychologist is, indeed, given at the present 

 day to two distinct types of scholar. On the one hand, we have the 

 psychologist as I have represented him: a man keenly interested 

 in mind, with no purpose beyond mind; a man enamored of intro- 

 spection; a man to whom the most fascinating thing in the universe 

 is the human consciousness; a man to whom successful analysis of 

 an unresolved mental complex is as the discovery of a new genus 

 to the zoologist or a new river to the explorer; a man who lives in 

 direct companionship with his mental processes as the naturalist 

 lives with the creatures that are ordinarily shunned or ignored; a 

 man to whom the facts and laws of mind are, if I may so put it, the 

 most real things that the world can show. On the other hand, we 

 have men to whom mind appeals either as a datum or problem, or 

 both, to be dealt with by philosophy, by theory of knowledge and 

 theory of being; or as a natural phenomenon, something that must 

 be taken account of whenever life is taken account of, in evolutionary 

 biology, in anthropology, in medicine, and where not. Of the 

 psychologists of this second order, the philosophers, you will say, do 

 not concern us. Yet they do, somewhat. I suppose that all sciences 



certainly, all young sciences are liable to be told by well- 

 wishers that they have mistaken their work; that they would 

 advance more quickly, and more solidly, if they would put off their 

 present business, and settle down to this or that suggested problem. 

 At any rate, experimental psychology has always received such 

 hortation from friendly philosophers. If, now, I have ignored this 

 advice, it is not from lack of gratitude, but simply because, after 

 consideration, I have come to believe that experimental psychology 

 knows what she is about, and can w r alk without assistance. Out- 

 siders, we are told, see most of the game. I venture to urge that the 

 insider better knows how the game is to be played. 



We are left with the two opposed types: what shall I term them? 



the inner and the outer, the subjective and the objective, the 

 narrower and the broader. What, then, of the outer, wider, object- 

 ive problems of experimental psychology? 



Let us be clear, first of all, the matter admits of no hesitation 

 or compromise, that the experimental psychology of the normal, 

 adult, human mind must take the form that I have described, the 

 form of introspective analysis. I have little sympathy or patience 

 with those experimentalists who would build up an experimental 

 psychology out of psycho-physics and logic ; who throw stimuli into 

 the organism, take reactions out, and then, from some change in 

 the nature of the reactions, infer the fact of a change in conscious- 

 ness. Why in the world should one argue and infer, when con- 

 sciousness itself is there, always there, waiting to be interrogated? 

 This is but a penny-in-the-slot sort of science. Compared with intro- 



